BROWNSVILLE WAS AT THE CROSSROADS OF US-MEXICAN HISTORY WITH LERDO AND DIAZ

By Juan Montoya

Revolutions and intrigue in Mexico have always spilled across the Rio Grande into Texas. Convulsive events that have shaken that land invariably have had an impact on events on our side of the river.
That was never more true than when dictator Porfirio Diaz – at that time a general in the Mexican army – staged an unconstitutional takeover to try to topple president Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, who was elected in 1872 and again in 1876, after Benito Juarez died in 1871.
Both men, Diaz and Lerdo, have indelible ties to Brownsville, the first one through the establishment of his revolutionary headquarters here in 1876, and the latter through the only known publication of his memoirs by a long-defunct Brownsville newspaper – El Porvenir – in 1912.
Although there is no question that Diaz established his headquarters here (at what we now call the Stillman House), historians are in dispute about the authenticity of the Lerdo memoirs, although the work Memorias Ineditas del Lic. Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, is extensively quoted in many academic works.
The only known copy of the text, which is divided in two books published two years apart (1910 and 1912), is stored in the John Hunter Room at the University of Texas at Brownsville-Texas Southmost College.
Diaz, who considered himself the hero of the Cinco de Mayo (1862) in Puebla when Mexican forces defeated Napoleon III’s army of invasion, was continually plotting to overthrow Juarez. Even though history has given credit for the French defeat at Puebla to Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza, Diaz maintained it was he, not Zaragoza, which had beaten back the French.
Following the Guerra de la Reforma in Mexico (1858-1861), Mexico’s Zapotec Indian president Benito Juarez reestablished a constitutional government in Mexico City. Among his cabinet members was Lerdo, then a magistrate in the Mexican Supreme Court as well as the rector of the San Idelfonso College of Law, basically the only academic facility providing that instruction in Mexico. Later, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Lerdo was next in the line of presidential succession since no office of vice-presidents existed (or exists) in Mexico.
When Juarez died in 1871, Lerdo assumed power when he won the election of 1872. Lerdo was to finish his four-year term in 1876, and it was then, when Lerdo’s reelection was confirmed by the Mexican Congress, that Diaz launched his revolution in earnest.
Diaz had initial called for revolution against the Lerdo government in January, 1876, in the village of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. The Plan de Tuxtepec called for the “non-reelection” of Lerdo, and mentions vague assurances of universal suffrage. The plan names Diaz as general of the “regeneration army” which was to return the popular liberties to the people of Mexico.
Sensing that his revolution would be crushed by federal government troops, Diaz seized the moment and fled to Veracruz where he wrote a government official that he was fleeing because the government was attempting to arrest him “without any reason.”
Diaz left Veracruz on a ship to the United States and arrived in Brownsville and set up his new headquarters. Historian John Mason Hart contends that U.S. industrialists – including the Stillmans – gave Diaz financial and moral support to wage his revolution for promises of concessions in the Mexican economy. Hart says the Stillmans loaned Diaz the use of their home to use as his military headquarters.
P.G. Cavazos, a descendant of Sabas Cavazos, son of land-grant recipient Doña Estefana Goseascochea Cavazos de Cortina, said family lore and tradition tells of his ancestor Sabas supporting the Diaz rebellion by providing him a loan of 10,000 gold pesos – a heavy sum of money even then. Sabas was the half-brother of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who defied Texan authorities following the loss of Mexican territory north of the Rio Grande after 1848.
“Our grandfathers and grandmothers used to tell us that Sabas Cavazos loaned the money to Diaz and considered him his friend,” said Cavazos.
At that time, his half-brother Juan (Cortina) was waging a guerrilla war against the Americans in Texas.
“My ancestor visited Porfirio Diaz in Brownsville and Diaz visited him at his ranch in Santa Rita,” said Cavazos. “That’s where they became friends and he lent him the money to further his revolution.”
Diaz, along with Gen. Manuel Gonzalez, captured Matamoros on March 1876 after federal troops deserted the city plaza.
Diaz and his army went on to invade Tamaulipas and issued the Plan de Palo Blanco named after small town in northern Tamaulipas close to the Rio Grande. The new plan, except for a few changes, was, “the same pig with very small changes.”
That change was the omission of Article 6. Where the Plan de Tuxtepec offered Vicente Riva Palacios, Mexican Supreme Court Chief Justice and the succession to the presidency, the Plan de Palo Blanco permits Riva Palacios to retain his post but for it to function only as an “administrative” post.
Diaz continued inciting his revolution through April and May of 1876 in northern Tamaulipas. His revolt was basically in suspended animation, since those months went by without the revolt making any appreciable gains in territory or conversions of the population.
Toward the end of May, Mexican General Mariano Escobedo defeated the Diaz forces in Tamaulipas, and Gen. Carlos Fuero, military commander of the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon, dealt a crushing defeat to the remnants of Diaz’s forces at the Battle of Icamole, a town near the city of Monterrey.

Diaz fled back to Brownsville, and from here he left aboard a ship to New Orleans.

Thus ended Diaz’s attempts at revolution in northern Mexico. But a postscript to this story is that when Diaz finally overthrew Lerdo in 1876, he invited Sabas Cavazos to an official ceremony in Mexico City to celebrate his great victory. Lerdo by then was in exile in New York, vowing never to return until the dictator had died.
“The story goes that when Sabas Cavazos attended the banquet to toast to Diaz’s victory, there was something placed in his drink that made him violently sick and later that night he died,” Cavazos said. “Many of his relatives thought that Diaz had poisoned him so he wouldn’t have to pay him back the 10,000 gold pesos.”
But Diaz did return one favor to Sabas. The wealthy landowner of Cameron County did not want his brother (Juan Cortina) wreaking havoc and keeping the border aflame with his constant attacks upon American forces. P.G. Cavazos said that Diaz – as had Lerdo before him – had Cortina arrested and transfered to Mexico City where he placed him in the military prison of Santiago Tlatelolco. Only later, when things quieted down, Cortina was placed under lax house arrest in his home in Atzcapozalco, in the capital.
Lerdo, meanwhile, continued living in exile in New York City and as historians write, no memoirs of his deeds as Mexican statesman, legislator, or as president were ever known to exist. The loss to historians is immense. Lerdo was in a position to comment on the Juarez presidency, having served in his cabinet. He was in President Ignacio Comonfort’s cabinet when Juarez and the liberals rejected his plan to scuttle the Plan of Ayutla which included the Laws of Reform separating church and state in Mexico.
He was with Juarez when Maximilian and Carlota were placed as Emperor and Empress of Mexico by Napoleon III and he fled to internal exile with Juarez as imperial forces and their Mexican collaborators sought to capture them in the desert wastes of Nuevo Leon, Durango, Coahuila, and Chihuahua from May 1863 to July 1867, four years, one month, and 15 days.
And he was with Juarez when the Zapotec president reestablished the constitutionalist government upon his triumphant return to the capital.
When he died April 12, 1889, in New York City of capillary bronchitis, his body was surreptitiously kidnapped by agents for Diaz, and he was sent by funerary train from New York, via El Paso, and then basically retraced the route he and Juarez had traveled when they returned triumphant after Maximilian and his forces of occupation and collaborators were defeated.
Knapp writes that the hypocritical eulogies given to the president who never abdicated the constitutional presidency he took into exile bordered on the ridiculous, with orator after orator praising the man in front of Diaz, but never mentioning that the dictator had overthrown him by force.
On Diaz’s order, Lerdo was buried with full state honors at Mexico City’s Panteón de Los Hombres Ilustres.
It wasn’t until years later, after Diaz was overthrown in 1910 by Francisco I. Madero’s revolution, that the Memorias Ineditas surfaced, ostensibly published by El Porvenir in Brownsville, Texas. Whether the book is a compilation of Lerdo’s memoirs or a paraphrasing of history will be left up to scholars to debate.
However, the publisher notes that the two-tome book was edited by Gen. Doctor Ignacio Martinez, who was involved in many of the battles and skirmishes in northern Mexico. The book was donated to the John Hunter Room historical collection by Eleuterio De La Garza, a Brownsville resident who lived during the time many of the later events took place.
Among some of the poignant quotes attributed the man who never accepted dictatorship instead of the rule of law is one that says: “Oh, my homeland, my eyes have lost sight of you, but I found you again in my heart.”